Louise's Crossing Page 10

  Maybe I’d worked for a spy organization long enough now that every odd incident looked like a conspiracy, but Eddie Bryant’s death niggled at me, even though suicide was an obvious explanation. The man was crippled for life, his marriage was unhappy and, according to everyone who knew him, he had a vile disposition. He was mean to his wife, his orderly and the passengers who tried to be friendly with him.

  I remembered how brave Phoebe’s son, Milt, had been when he came home after he lost his left arm. Yes, he drank too much for a time, yes, he was short-tempered occasionally, yes, he spent hours on his bed with his cigarettes and records some days, but his basic attitude was to move on with his life, even if he didn’t know how. He insisted on working, even though the only job he could find at first was as an elevator operator. He made himself go out with old friends despite his self-consciousness. He practiced doing everyday tasks with one arm. It seemed that Eddie Bryant had not possessed any such admirable qualities.

  So perhaps Bryant had killed himself. But I wondered. Why did Blanche spend no time with him, and why did he dislike her so much? I thought that must be due to problems in the marriage before his injury. Were she and Tom having an affair, either on the way from England to the States or on this voyage? Or both? It seemed likely; she was absent from her berth so much that if she wasn’t with him, what was she doing? Of course, they would both deny it. I hated to think that Tom might be involved in Eddie Bryant’s death, but reason required me to accept that possibility. Where was Tom when Eddie was left alone on deck? If he wasn’t on watch, he could have been with Blanche. Blanche said she’d been elsewhere on deck, but had anyone seen her? Why did Nigel leave Eddie alone at the rail of the ship for the time it took him to fetch a cigarette lighter from their stateroom? Just about everyone on board ship smoked; Nigel could have bummed a match from a passing seaman. And could it be a coincidence that Nigel signed on to the Amelia Earhart for its return trip to England? If it wasn’t a coincidence, what was his reason? Was he spying on Blanche on behalf of the Bryant family? And Tom, too? My head was aching with the effort of sorting it all out. In the end I had nothing. Just a series of events that I couldn’t link together in any way that indicated that Eddie Bryant’s death was anything other than suicide.

  I was thinking of going back to my berth when I heard Grace singing. That woman had a lovely voice. The mellow sound of ‘Take the A Train’ floated up to me, reminding me of records and the radio, which I missed so much. I poked my head out of the engine window. ‘Hi, Grace,’ I called out. ‘I’m up here!’

  I startled her. She jerked back and looked up at me, her hand on her heart. ‘Oh, my goodness, Mrs Pearlie! You scared me!’

  ‘Come on up and join me,’ I said. ‘The view is great.’

  Grace looked around, checking to see if anyone saw her. Then she climbed the few steps to the locomotive cab to join me. ‘What on earth possessed you to come up here?’ she asked, as she sat next to me in the cab.

  ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of my little berth or of making small talk in the wardroom, and it’s cold on deck. Up here, the windows in the cab keep out the wind.’

  ‘There aren’t many places to go on this ship to get away,’ she said. ‘I’m the only colored woman on board this trip, so I have my own berth, but it’s right next to the galley. It’s so noisy! And since the cooks have to fix food for all the watches, it’s noisy twenty-four hours a day!’

  From our perch we watched the crew get a cable on the crippled corvette. A dinghy with several seamen, hunched into their collars with their sou’westers pulled low over their faces, carried the line, which uncoiled from a winch on our deck, to the corvette. Its crewmembers hauled the line aboard and fastened it to a stanchion.

  ‘I hope it doesn’t take long for the corvette’s engines to be repaired. We’re sitting ducks out here,’ I said.

  ‘I heard in the mess that it should only take a couple of days. Then the convoy will have to return to its regular speed and course.’

  ‘What if all the scattered ships haven’t found us yet?’

  She shrugged. ‘We’ll keep signaling and sounding our foghorns. But if they don’t link up, they’re on their own.’

  We weren’t even a third of the way to our destination yet. That was a long way for a single ship without an armed escort to travel over this cold and deadly ocean.

  Grace and I both fell silent, thinking, I assumed, of the same thing: the fate of the ships that didn’t make it back to the convoy. Then I heard Grace sniffling, and when I looked at her, I saw tears running down her face.

  ‘Sweetie,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong?’

  ‘Everything,’ she said, and leaned her head on my shoulder, sobbing.

  I didn’t know what to do except to comfort her as best I could. I put an arm around her shoulder, lent her my handkerchief and patted her hand.

  ‘Can I help?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t say anything. I don’t dare. If it got out!’

  ‘You can tell me anything,’ I said. ‘I’m good at keeping secrets.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘You won’t tell?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It’s Nigel!’ she said, and then burst into tears again.

  Nigel? The only Nigel I knew was Eddie Bryant’s orderly, who’d posed as a seaman to get a ride back to England. Could he be the person Grace was crying over?

  ‘Nigel and me … well, he’s my sweetheart. OK! You’re shocked, I know,’ Grace said.

  Not shocked so much as concerned. Segregation of the colored race from the rest of society was the law in the United States. And a romantic relationship between a man and woman of different races would be just plain dangerous to any couple tempted to date or marry. I had been raised to believe that miscegenation was wrong, but I had lived in DC for two years, where I had met every sort of person from banished kings to homosexuals. My brain was my own and I’d concluded that segregation and prejudice were wrong. I admired Eleanor Roosevelt’s fight against it. So I was more worried for Grace than I was shocked.

  Of course, Britain wasn’t segregated. Grace and Nigel could court there.

  ‘You see,’ Grace said, ‘we got to be friends on the voyage from England to the States. Nigel was Mr Bryant’s orderly, you know. And Nigel was always kind to him. I don’t know how he did it day after day. Anyway, when I was off watch, I sometimes sat with Mr Bryant so Nigel could take a break.’

  A loud huzzah sounded from the ship, as the cable between the damaged corvette and the Amelia Earhart held. I felt the ship shudder as the cable went taut.

  ‘Everyone has said Mr Bryant was unpleasant,’ I said.

  ‘Once when I came to sit with him, I went into the room just as he threw an ashtray at Mr Gil. Later Mr Gil told me he only offered to play cards with him. And Nigel said that Mr Bryant kept saying that he wasn’t responsible for the plane crash, that there was something wrong with the plane. He said he would sue the people responsible for crippling him when he got home.

  ‘Who was he going to sue? Hitler? Anyway, once Mr Bryant was settled in bed with his book at night, Nigel would come on deck and we’d find a spot to sit and talk. We couldn’t go to the mess hall for fear people would stare at us. We liked each other. Is that such a crime?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ I said.

  ‘After Mr Bryant died, Nigel was in an awful spot. He had no place to stay and no job. He just wanted to get back to England, but he didn’t have the money for a ticket. My auntie let him sleep on the sofa. I knew I would be headed back to England in a few weeks and we wanted to be together.’

  ‘Nigel said he found the ID card,’ I said.

  ‘No. I bought it from an old seaman who had lost his leg,’ Grace said. ‘I knew that cargo ships were always short-handed, so Nigel just showed up at the Amelia Earhart and got a spot on the departure day. We were lucky.’

  ‘What are you and Nigel g
oing to do when we get to Liverpool?’

  I’d asked the wrong question. Grace started to cry again.

  ‘Sweetie, don’t; it’ll be OK,’ I said.

  By now my handkerchief was too damp to do her much good, so Grace wiped her face with her scarf. ‘Nigel said that the master almost put him in the brig! What if he has him arrested when we get to Liverpool?’

  ‘I heard that conversation,’ I said. ‘The master was much angrier at Blanche than he was with Nigel. He said Nigel was a good worker and he needed him to stay on duty. I bet once we get to Liverpool we can talk the master into letting Nigel off the hook. He should stay out of the master’s way until then. And the two of you need to be careful, too.’ It might be legal in England for Nigel and Grace to court, but most of the people on board were Americans. And England wasn’t short of racial prejudice either, despite its laws.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We are careful. Even if we do make it to Liverpool without getting drowned and Nigel doesn’t get arrested, I’ll only have a couple of weeks off before I get a new assignment. And I can’t resign from the merchant marine during wartime.’

  I wanted to tell her that if Nigel loved her, he’d wait for her, but it seemed like such a platitude that I didn’t say anything. It was wartime. Nothing was guaranteed.

  On the third morning after the gale, the corvette’s engine fired up and its crew cast off our cable line. A huzzah went up from our seamen on deck as it was reeled in. The Evans signaled us to increase our speed to nine knots and remain on course.

  Three of the ships in our convoy never found us. All three were cargo ships. Three cargo ships without a defensive escort. If they weren’t lost for good, we just had to pray they could find their own way to Liverpool. It was impossible to use the radio to try to locate them; it would broadcast our own position to the enemy. The only use of the radio that was allowed was reception, short bursts of weather forecasts or enemy sightings. So if a German submarine surfaced in our midst, we could broadcast that! The three Sparks spent most of their time stretched out on a cot in the radio room reading comic books.

  We didn’t have any idea what was happening in the rest of the world. I thought I would miss the world news, but I didn’t. It was a relief not to hear of the terrible things going on in the war, day in and day out. I did miss music, though. Especially the Grand Ole Opry. My fellow boarders used to tease me about my love of ‘hillbilly’ music. It would be a long time before I heard ‘Wildwood Flower’ or ‘Great Speckled Bird’ again. I suspected that the Carter Family and Roy Acuff weren’t big in England.

  I’d read both of the books I’d brought with me and Olive’s, too. In desperation, I rummaged through the dog-eared paperbacks in the ship’s library, which is how I found myself wrapped in blankets in my bunk deep in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. The heroine was a Utah rancher named Jane Withersteen whose livelihood was threatened by a marriage she did not want. Until a lone cowboy named Lassiter came to town. I could not put it down.

  I heard light footsteps running down the gangway and then a small hand knocking at my door. I knew it was Corrie Smit.

  ‘Come in, Corrie,’ I said.

  Corrie burst into my berth, her hair flying behind her and her scarf trailing the floor.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie, Miss Olive says you have to come out on deck! You won’t believe it!’

  ‘Oh, Corrie, not now,’ I said. ‘I’m reading such a good book. And it’s freezing outside.’

  ‘You have to come! There’s an iceberg!’

  It was an iceberg, all right. Of course, I had never seen one before. Corrie and Alida and I crowded together on the ship’s rail to gawk. It was huge, towering over us. When the sun poked through the clouds, it sparkled like diamonds. One side was steep and vertical – from sheering cleanly off its mother ice field, I assumed. The other side was ragged and battered, as if waves had been beating on it forever. Two spires, as tall as church steeples, rose from the main ice mass. Seabirds, mostly gulls and terns, careened around it, squawking. They’d land on it in groups, socialize, eat a little something, groom themselves, then take off again with beating wings.

  I couldn’t get over how enormous it was. ‘It’s like a floating mountain,’ I said to the girls.

  ‘Iceberg comes from a Dutch word,’ Alida said. ‘Ijsberg. It means ice mountain.’

  Tom joined us at the rail. ‘Are we far enough away from it?’ I asked him. ‘Isn’t an iceberg much larger under the surface of the water?’ I was thinking of the Titanic, of course.

  ‘We’re taking constant soundings,’ he said. ‘We’re at a safe distance. But darn, it’s big! The old-timers on the crew are saying it’s the biggest iceberg they’ve ever seen. I wish I could stay and admire it, but I’ve got to go talk to Sparks. The master wants us to broadcast the berg’s coordinates to the convoy.’ So this giant white mountain was dangerous enough to break radio silence.

  Ronan took Tom’s place at the rail. He was wrapped in his tweed coat, wearing a flat cap with a scarf tied over it and his chin. He smelled of pipe tobacco.

  ‘I just talked to Chief Pitts,’ Ronan said. ‘He measured it somehow from the bridge deck. He says it’s over two hundred and ten feet tall at the tip of the highest spire.’

  ‘That’s more than twenty stories!’ Taller than most of the buildings in DC.

  News of the magnitude of our iceberg spread to the crew members who weren’t on watch, and soon the decks were packed with seaman staring up at the berg with hands shading their eyes. The boat deck, which was a level above the main deck, was crowded too. I noticed Nigel there, leaning over the rail, in a group with his British buddies. The Smits were with me and Ronan at the main deck rail, while Olive stood on a cable spool behind us so she could see over our heads. The master was on the bridge deck with binoculars to his eyes.

  I wasn’t surprised not to see Gil or Blanche. Gil was too worldly to be interested in something as mundane as an iceberg. Blanche was avoiding people even more than usual. After her public hissy fit on deck when she’d recognized Nigel, she’d even taken to eating her meals in her cabin.

  Our ship and the iceberg drifted apart quickly. The berg was headed south to melt, while we were steaming east to England. The sun vanished behind another bank of gray cloud and the wind whipped up again. The crowd on deck wandered back to their berths or their watch duties. Tom never rejoined us; something must have distracted him.

  Mrs Smit touched my arm. ‘Grace should have the coffee down below by now,’ she said. ‘We’re going inside. Want to join us?’

  ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell Olive where I’m headed.’

  ‘I’ll come when I’ve finished my pipe,’ Ronan said.

  Olive decided she was ready for a cup of coffee too, so we went inside the door to the head of the stairway to our berths. That was when we heard the screaming. Olive, with her nurse’s training, reacted first, running for the head of the staircase. I was right behind her. We both scrambled down and found the Smit women gathered around someone lying at the bottom. They’d stopped screaming, but Alida and Corrie were sobbing.

  Grace lay splayed at the foot of the stairs. Her eyes were open wide, staring at the ceiling. Olive knelt next to her and felt for her pulse, then shook her head. Grace was dead.

  NINE

  ‘What a bloody shame,’ the master said. ‘Damn it! I’ll have to telegraph her parents when we get to port.’

  ‘She was a good girl,’ the chief steward said. ‘A good worker. Everyone liked her.’

  Olive and I had stayed with Grace’s body while Mrs Smit took her daughters back to their berth. Mr Smit had rushed up the steps and straight to the bridge to tell the master what had happened. The master sent a seaman to notify Chief Pearce, who was Grace’s boss. When Chief Pearce arrived, he knelt next to Grace and gently closed her staring eyes. ‘I’ll get a blanket to cover her,’ he said, straightening up and going down the passageway toward the steward’s closet.
/>
  My OSS training kicked in and I took in the entire scene of Grace’s death before it was disturbed. I could hardly look at her, but I forced myself. It seemed clear that she’d fallen down the stairs and died from severe head injuries. The tray she’d been carrying lay in our passageway; its contents – coffee pot, tea, mugs, sugar and milk – had spilled all over the floor. Broken cookies were scattered about. Oatmeal raisin.

  The chief steward returned with a blanket. He and Olive wrapped it neatly around Grace’s body. ‘I just don’t understand,’ the chief steward said, as he carefully lifted Grace’s head to enclose it in the blanket. I could see a large dark bruise on the back of her head from where I stood. Maybe she had ruptured a blood vessel. ‘Grace was so agile; she went up and down ladders, through gangways during storms, like a squirrel in his favorite tree. Why did she fall in calm weather down the safest stair on the ship?’ he said.

  The master, who’d been standing with his arms crossed for minutes now, must have been thinking along the same lines, because he said, ‘I wonder if something distracted her? So that she missed a step and fell?’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ the chief steward said. ‘There were no witnesses. The Smits found her when they came inside to get their coffee.’

  ‘Everyone was on deck, looking at the iceberg,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll lay her out in the first-aid room,’ the chief steward said. ‘The door locks.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ Olive said.

  ‘We’ll bury her at sea tomorrow afternoon,’ the master said. The chief steward lifted Grace’s torso and Olive took her legs. They carried her up the stairway, cautiously.